Some racing recommendations:

Midnight Club 3 Dub Edition

Enthusia

Need for Speed Hot Pursuit 2 (the PS2 version is the best one)

Burnout 3 Takedown AND Revenge, both are stellar

Tokyo Extreme Racer 3 and Drift 2

One of the most disappointing GPU launches I can think of at the highest MSRP ever…and they’ll still be sold out and scalped for the next 3 months at least.

I wonder if the GPU market will ever return to normalcy at this point.

The single player mode was decent. I like the career structure, it’s something unique compared to most other racing games’ checklists of events.

Driving physics were a minor improvement over Heat, which was already solid on that front (especially compared to the train wrecks of NFS '15 and Payback).

Contrary to most NFS fans, I wish they leaned more into the cartoon/anime aesthetic, something closer to Auto Modellista. I’m guessing EA didn’t want to risk it though, so Unbound’s aesthetic feels a little half-assed as a result.

Car customization is great as expected, Ghost nailed this in NFS '15 and basically copy/pasted the same system into everything since, which I’m fine with.

The multiplayer is live service garbage and I’m very disappointed that all post-launch updates have ignored the single player mode entirely… Or maybe I should be happy that they didn’t incorporate live service garbage into the single player…

Overall, 7.5/10 if you ignore the multiplayer. It’s Ghost’s best game.

Minor update on this: I ended up returning the Samsung G80SD since it was being a finicky piece of shit in other ways and got an HP Omen Transcend 32 instead (I know, HP sucks, but I have nothing but good things to say about my HP Omen 27i so I took the chance). Same exact 3rd gen QD-OLED panel but this time it just works™. 240hz, VRR, all good out of the box.

So my point about the monitor is kind of moot, the G80SD just sucks, Linux is fine.

Gigabyte X870 Aorus Elite Wifi7

I tend to avoid Gigabyte, but the only stock of 9800X3Ds available was in motherboard bundles on Newegg, so I ended up with it lol

I also noticed that Bluetooth still isn’t working, so I am still waiting for 100% compatibility.

I game on Linux lol

is it even noticeable beyond 100hz when not gaming

Actually yes, honestly it’s most noticeable when moving your mouse or dragging windows around. It’s insanely smooth.

My old monitor was 165hz and I didn’t expect the jump to be noticeable, but it actually was. It’s definitely well beyond the point of diminishing returns (120 is fine imo), but it’s still a nice upgrade.

For sure, if I was in the market for a laptop, System76, Tuxedo, and (while not exclusively Linux) Framework would be at the top of my list

For general PC hardware though, I’ve always been late to the party. I upgraded to Ryzen 3000 right before 5000 was coming out, so hardware support was already perfect on Linux. That’s basically been my upgrade strategy for the past 10 years, so I’ve personally never really encountered these teething problems before now.

adding in support for end user hardware is an accident and requires extra effort on hardware makers’ part who don’t always rise to the challenge when they don’t believe it’s profitable enough for the effort; in which case, volunteers have to step in to fill the gap.

That’s really the crux of the problem. How can we make companies care and/or better support volunteers to get patches out sooner.

I yearn for Fedora

When CPUs were a lot slower you could genuinely get noticeable performance improvements by compiling packages yourself, but nowadays the overhead from running pre-compiled binaries is negligible.

Hell, even Gentoo optionally offers binary packages now.

That’s easy, just pick btrfs, gnome, pipewire, systemd, gdm, grub, and add flatpak in your additional packages.

Every other configuration is wrong.

/s

Now imagine the same meme but with Gentoo and LFS

Readable on Voyager as well.

EDIT: Not to say it looks good, but it’s readable.

I’ve switched from Proton Drive and Calendar to Nextcloud, which is an upgrade.

I’ve switched from Proton Pass to Vaultwarden, which works just as well for me.

I’ve switched from Standard Notes to Memos, which has also been an improvement for me considering my notes needs are pretty basic and Memos fits perfectly.

That leaves Mail, Simple Login, and VPN. I have alternatives lined up with Tuta, addy.io, and Mullvad, but I haven’t pulled the trigger yet. I would be paying more than I am now with Proton (2 year plan) and it would be a massive pain to switch email providers.

I’m considering staying with Proton for only those services, but on thin ice. If they fuck up again, I’m absolutely out.

I may end up switching anyway however. This situation has left a bad taste in my mouth, and if I have the motivation and time to deal with migrating one day in the near future, I might just do it regardless. We’ll see.

Qobuz used to allow downloading entire albums and then switched to only allowing track downloads unless you download some app they’re trying to push (which I never used).

7digital offers both album and track downloads, and looking at my account it seems that it’s the album download specifically that just doesn’t work. I can download tracks one at a time.

Nice, waiting paid off. I’m actually interested in picking up the new God of War and Horizon games now.

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I sympathize so hard. I actually wrote a post about this a few months ago. I gave up and switched to Tidal, I was tired of hunting for flacs online.

However, if you’re more willing to stick with it than I was:

Bandcamp seems to be less used now than it used to be, but is still the king. Qobuz (as you described) have been adding in roadblocks to purchasing albums more and more presumably to push people to streaming. 7digital is is kind of dead, I bought one older album from them and the download didn’t work.

On to stuff you didn’t mention:

If you like electronic music, Juno Download and Beatport have a solid catalog, but be prepared to pay a lot more than Qobuz or 7digital.

HDtracks is also expensive and I’ve never used it, but it’s been around forever.

Artist websites will sometimes, very rarely, maybe offer lossless downloads (example)

You can also check if you have any local record stores near you, they’ll usually have CDs as well. Some will even carry new releases.

Good luck.